St Edmundsbury Cathedral
Low Sunday 2015
The psalmist prays to God: even darkness is no darkness with you; the night is as clear as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike.
The story of Doubting Thomas has to be one of the most interesting of the post-resurrection encounters
between Jesus and his disciples. Why wasn’t he there when Jesus came? Why was he so reluctant to
believe? What is the relationship between doubt and belief? How do we know what’s true? Questions,
questions. Such as probably filled Thomas’ mind more than most. So if you’re someone who brings
questions to your faith – sometimes, perhaps, even to the extent that you wonder if there’s any faith
left – then Thomas is the man for you. Doubting Thomas. Thank heavens for him. We don’t need to
fear that our questions may be unacceptable. We can ask anything of God. We might not get the
answer we want or expect, but it’s all right to ask. So why wasn’t he there?
I don’t know if you have ever been betrayed. Let down, fundamentally, so you feel like your life has
broken apart. Most of us go through enough experience to know what that’s like. How hard it can be to
recover, hard to see that life is ever worth living again. Sometimes we are left with wounds and scars
that remain with us, that alter our outlook on life. We can become blinded by a deep-seated habitual
anger or bitterness that darkens our perspective. I always suspect Thomas had suffered such an
experience. His reaction to the news that Jesus had died was to withdraw. He wasn’t with the other
disciples, when they first saw the risen Christ. I imagine he’d gone off by himself, full of such dark
disappointment he didn’t know what to do with himself. Perhaps Thomas gave himself utterly as a
disciple. And as utterly as he had loved, so utterly he felt betrayed.
When we’re bitter or angry, we can become small minded, unable to see things, blind to the truth of the
matter. Our knowing is affected by our emotional state. They say love is blind. Well, bitterness, anger,
grief can make us blind too. Thomas’ response to the disciples, fired up as they were with the sight of
the risen Lord, was churlish. ‘Unless I see the marks, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe’.
He is wilfully closed minded. He’s not having any of it. I can understand that. He’s not prepared to see
anything beyond what’s in front of him. It can happen to us too. Our knowing can be clouded by other
principles we hold to be true. Such that we don’t see the wood for the trees.
Thomas raises really interesting questions of how we do know things. Actually, not just things – which
tend, usually, to be there, right in front of our eyes, there to be touched with our fingers. How do we
know other less tangible realities? Love? Beauty? The truth of God, for instance? A big, big question for
many in today’s world.
There’s a prominent humanist thinker called W.K. Clifford who argued that it was immoral to believe
things for which one lacks evidence1. In his 1877 essay "The Ethics of Belief" he wrote his famous
principle that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient
evidence." He was taking issue with religious thinkers for whom "blind faith" was a virtue. It’s had a
great influence on a great many people. It’s initially plausible, isn’t it? Rational. Straightforward: it’s
wrong, always, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. But
ironically, it doesn’t stack up, when you examine it rationally. We all take things on trust all the time.
We can’t possibly check everything out.
1
See Keith Ward The Evidence for God DLT, 2014, p118
What about the latest work at Cern? Scientists, who, on Easter Sunday morning, have just begun the
attempt to collide two beams of high-energy particles by racing them through the Large Hadron
Collider's 16.7 miles (or 27 kilometres if you prefer) of circular underground tunnels?
Two years ago, the collider was used to astound the world with the discovery of the Higgs boson, an
elementary particle that gives other particles mass. Now scientists have their sights set on an even
more exotic trophy - dark matter, the invisible, undetectable material that makes up 84 per cent of
matter in the universe and binds galaxies together. If we were to apply Clifford’s rule to this, then
those scientists wouldn’t get past the first block. What evidence would count as sufficient to even start
to suspect that dark matter exists? Each of those scientists – indeed every rational scientist – has to rely
on the authority of other scientists. And most importantly, every scientist has to rely upon the
imaginative leap of faith to lead them to begin to check out what might be the case about this complex,
mysterious, wonderful universe in which we live.
As it happens, the latest thinking – so far as I understand it – is that what we see of the universe is the
tip of the iceberg. What we see, and hear, and touch are the molecules that hum at a particular
resonance for us to be able to perceive them. But there is so much more that we can’t see or hear or
touch: dark matter that resonates at much higher pitch, with an energy that is beyond our capacity to
detect. How do scientists know that such dark matter exists? Because if it doesn’t, there’s no
explanation for why celestial bodies don’t whirl out of existence as gravity becomes weaker, the further
away they are from the centre of a galaxy. Instead of stars going slower and slower on the periphery of
our galaxy, they travel much faster than predicted on the edge. This can only be explained by the
hypothesis that we are held in some dark matter, like gluggy glue, that holds all that there is together
in a stable supersymmetry of mass and energy. A supersymmetry that provides the architecture of the
universe.
Thomas. Who knows if his knowing was darkened by bitter anger. But his insistence that he see and
touch for himself is a very human impulse. We all resort to such wilful and deliberate narrowmindedness at times. It doesn’t do us credit though. It doesn’t do our leading scientists much good, to
have such a lack of imagination. Sometimes we have to believe stuff we can’t prove, but which we have
an instinct might be the case.
Now, I know there are rationalists who would come back at me and say, ‘yes, but just because we don’t
understand everything, doesn’t mean that God exists.’ And those of us who are prepared to believe,
even though we have not seen, need to be able to respond – yes, but just consider the evidence. The
evidence of a universe that has energies we only begin to perceive.
Christians believe in energy. An energy that holds things together in tension, in relationship. An
energy that seeks the good, that is attractive. An energy that enables attachment between mother and
child, so the brain of a small new born baby develops to make the necessary connections for adult
maturity in life and relationship. An energy that heals grown men and women of the scars of bitterness
and anger so they can forgive and see again the good things of life. It’s the energy that has been
described like this: even darkness is no darkness with you; the night is as clear as the day; darkness
and light to you are both alike. The light and energy flowed out of the dark wounds of Jesus Christ
and bathed Thomas. This was energy powerful enough, even, to bring someone back from the dead.
The evidence is there. What blindness makes it so difficult to believe in love?
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.